Assessing The Good Life

As my folks were doing a big cleanup of the house I grew up in, an old copy of Living The Good Life by Helen and Scott Nearing turned up.  I had heard this book mentioned as a venerated bible of the 1970s, but had never actually read it, so I was interested to finally get to the source.  In poking around on the internet after reading it, I came across a related memoir called Meanwhile, Next Door to the Good Life by Jean Hay Bright, who was invited (together with her husband at the time) by the Nearings to homestead as their neighbors on the Maine coast.  This led me to another memoir, This Life is in Your Hands, by Melissa Coleman, daughter of Susan and Eliot Coleman, who were likewise invited by the Nearings to farm on their land. Eliot subsequently became a guru to the organic growing community in his own right.

Like Melissa, I grew up on an off-grid homestead in a then-remote corner of the coast of Maine, and soon after I entered into the island’s K-6 elementary school I understood that the way our family lived was unusual.  But I knew that we were not alone in our unconventional habits; many of my parents’ friends also lived in funky home-built shelters, kept livestock, and grew vegetables, and some likewise lived without electricity.  And as I read these books I was struck by the similarity, down to remarkably uncanny details, of their memories to the way I grew up, and I came to more fully understand that in my childhood I was unwittingly part of a significant cultural moment and movement.  As a student of the energy and resource issues that motivated many people in the black-to-the-land generation, I’m interested in questions about the significance of the practices and habits of that era, what can be learned, and what it suggests about the future.

The Nearings were a couple from comfortable urban backgrounds who moved to rural Vermont to homestead in the 1930s, when their radical politics drove them from more conventional occupations.  There they homesteaded, grew food, produced maple syrup and sugar as a cash crop, and cultivated an austere lifestyle and philosophy that they laid out in Living the Good Life, which was published in 1954.  As the rural economy recovered from the Depression and WW2, and the New York City culture encroached on southern Vermont with skiing and vacation homes, the Nearings moved to the remote coast of eastern Maine. There they took up their habits in relative obscurity, until young people searching for alternative ways of life following the cultural upheaval of the 1960s discovered their book and began flocking to their homestead on Cape Rosier for knowledge and inspiration in the early 1970s.  Eliot and Sue Coleman and Jean and her husband Keith were two of these couples whom the Nearings took a particular interest in, and they sold them plots of land to build and farm on.

One of the themes that emerges in Bright’s book is the significant gap between the Nearings’ idealistic prescription for organizing home economic and social life, and the reality of what actually works.  The Nearings claimed that one could live well on four hours a day of ‘bread labor’ to earn or produce basic needs, four hours a day of artistic, cultural, or activist pursuits, and four hours of social engagement.  They claimed to meet their economic and spiritual needs by following this plan, promoted it fervently, and scorned those who fell short in various ways (excessive participation in the cash economy, living on the proceeds from invested capital, eating meat, etc.) But Bright lays out a detailed case that the Nearings were essentially trustafarians – at various key points they received inheritances or other financial boosts that allowed them to buy large tracts of land, hire help, take shortcuts, and generally live much more comfortably would have been possible without that ready source of transfusion.  As a particular example, when the Nearings moved from Vermont to Maine, high-bush blueberries replaced maple syrup as their notional ‘cash crop’, but she shows that the crop never broke even, let alone sustaining their lifestyle and allowing them to build a spacious stone house.

Bright’s book is not a hatchet job; she clearly had and has a lot of regard for the Nearings, but also the scars of a person who has attempted to live by following an idealized prescription, combined with a reporter’s nose for the real story.   And I’m sympathetic to her instinct that it’s important to pay attention to the distinction between what is actually true and possible, and what people are motivated to believe is possible.  Richard Feynman said something along the lines of ‘the first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.’  The Nearings laid out a path that was attractive and salutary in its broad outlines, but deeply unrealistic in its details, and they had what is surely a natural human tendency to plaster over rather than expose and troubleshoot the places where reality fell short of the ideal. Bright’s book explores how their actions had profound impacts – both for better and for worse – on thousands, perhaps millions of people.

One of the most interesting aspects of both the Bright and Coleman books was the amazing degree of commonality in fine detail with how I grew up, three hours further west along the coast, including:

• Practical daily use of an antique Glenwood wood cookstove
• Drinking goat milk, and other people thinking goat milk was nasty
• Amateur goat obstetrics
• Trauma of butchering animals in the yard
• Racoons in the corn at night, wrangling of electric fences, and usually-futile attempts to shoot them in the dark
• Being the only kid in class with heavy whole-grain sandwiches, while the other kids have Hostess Twinkies
• Keeping a freezer on the porch of a neighbor in town who has electricity
• Concerns about a nuclear reactor uncomfortably close to home
• Newspaper reporters coming to write human interest stories about your family (I was too young to actually remember this, but the aluminum printing plate with a faded image of my mom cooking over a woodstove is still tacked to the wall in the back of the pole barn).
• The Tomten, and other children’s books that I have not come across elsewhere

These were among the quirkier resonances, but there were broader and more poignant ones as well.  Bright’s conclusion is that it is possible to live a fulfilling life on the land, foregoing many of the conveniences of modern society, but that unless you have a trust fund, it’s not realistic to do it by working only four hours per day, and that it’s all but impossible to do it without materially participating in the cash economy.  And so a related theme is how homesteaders find their craft and their place in that economy –  for Eliot Coleman it was market gardening and related promotions, and for Bright and her husband Keith it was writing and carpentry respectively – exactly the same trades, as it happens, that my parents found for themselves.

A related question that preoccupies me at the interface of ecology, economy, and culture is the question of which back-to-the-land practices represent true advances from a sustainability and social progress perspective, and which are solely cultural badges.  The Nearings were surely serious about ending war, alleviating social ills, and living in harmony with nature, and organizations like MOFGA were explicitly set up to change things.  So it’s fair and important to ask whether they/we were on the right track with their prescriptions, and to what extent they’ve been effective.

Surely a nuanced view is appropriate here.  Some of the cultural practices of that time (such as a whole-grains-based vegetarian diet) are surely improvements from an ecological perspective, a great number are surely neutral (e.g. the colors and patterns one chooses for their clothing), and a few are probably counterproductive (e.g. frequent trips to India in search of enlightenment).  Rather than painting in broad strokes, it seems necessary to look at individual cases, consider realistic alternatives, and actually do the math.  And to be effective, prescriptions must be socially as well as ecologically sustainable.  Another word for subsistence is poverty; sustained, austere, backbreaking labor of the sort the Nearings advocated is not going to catch on broadly in a world where mechanized assistance is cheap and readily available.  The Bright book is chock full of accounts of visitors who tried out the life and then went back to the city, and while some people (e.g. Eliot Coleman) find the hard work of farming viscerally compelling, most others (e.g. Jean Hay Bright) do not. Even those (like my family) who took to the back-to-the-land life gradually reintegrated themselves into the modern economy to a large extent, although many maintained back-to-the-land interests and cultural practices as well.

One thing that has struck me after attending the Commonground Fair off and on for close to 40 years, is how much of it is the same every year – the sheep dog demonstrations, the dry stone demonstrations, the spinning and weaving demonstrations, the draft horse demonstrations, the guy selling high-end Italian walking tractors, and so forth.  The Fair is extremely valuable as a gathering place and a venue to meet old friends and affirm cultural affiliations, but how effective is it as a mechanism to drive real change?  Forty years later, only a vanishingly small fraction of Mainers live off-grid (even though technology has made it quite comfortable), very few grow a meaningful amount of their own food, spinning and weaving are still oddities, virtually everyone still drives everywhere, and very few farmers are using horses for their tillage – and would we want them to?  I’m wary of the tendency to turn sensible-sounding sustainability concepts like Local Food into talismans or cultural badges rather than theories that should be soberly assessed as possible means to a particular set of ends.  As an example, I’ve calculated elsewhere on this blog that even fairly serious amateur gardening has only a marginal quantitative effect (even for the families that practice it), and speculated that it could be fairly easy to overwhelm any positive benefit by e.g. driving a truck repeatedly to a garden center for supplies.  It’s not hard for me to imagine that the greatest quantitative benefit of home gardening might come not from direct effects on the carbon impact of their diets, but rather from capturing the attention of the gardeners and reducing their inclination to take long trips by air during the growing season.

Another resonant theme is the challenge of maintaining relationships through the challenges of hard work, personal discovery, and parenting – particularly among the freewheeling communities of vibrant young people attracted to the Good Life scene.  With the exception of the Nearings, the couples at the center of both books grew apart and split up (perhaps hastened in the case of the Colemans by the tragic drowning death of their middle daughter in a farm pond).   I remember this phenomenon likewise as one of those mysteries of the adult world as seen from kid height – how families that I knew as inseparable social units would suddenly spin apart, with fragments moving to far-flung places, and newly-wise children solemnly explaining custody arrangements. But despite the unconventional mores of the back-to-the land community, I have no reason to believe our families were any less permanent than those in the mainstream, and the question of why certain couples weather these challenges while others do not remains a mystery toward which these books can only offer particularly detailed singular case studies.

There’s a lot more that could be said, but in any case, I heartily recommend this three-generation sequence of books as a thought- and memory-provoking journey for anyone who lived or is interested in the 1970s back-to-the-land movement.

Spring Planting 2018

Despite limited preparation on my part and very soggy ground conditions, a small but powerful crew came together in Five Islands in late April of this year and made significant progress on the orchard.  Thanks to all who participated, the orchard is in good shape, and our fingers are crossed for another good harvest this fall.

We set up about 330′ of permanent woven wire fence defining the western boundary of the orchard, took down the ratty plastic deer netting that had protected the orchard until now, and planted about a dozen new interstem trees with varieties recommended by Holly and David Buchanan, a local professional cidermaker. (David’s Portersfield Cider operation in Pownal is definitely worth checking out, both for the high quality cider and the beautiful reclaimed timberframe barn full of gleaming stainless steel equipment.)

The kids, led by Bodhi and Nola gathered an impressive quantity of rockweed at low tide, and this was spread along with organic fertilizer and lime around the new trees, which were then mulched with cardboard and wood chips.  Hopefully this will keep the weeds and grass at bay for a season and help them get established.  The crew also cleared a bunch of rocks, roots, and old fencing material in preparation for turning over and seeding the rows in the new ground in the northwest corner.  I hope to put this area in buckwheat and clover for the new bees, which hopefully will arrive in time to do the pollination.  We transplanted five of the Cornell high-octane sugar maples that had been temporarily growing between apples trees at the bottom of the orchard, moving them outside the fence and protecting them temporarily with cattle panels rolled into free-standing rings.

We also moved the last of the apple trees that had been planted in a five-gallon bucket with the sides split and splayed four ways; I came up with this technique after learning to graft, when I didn’t have enough space prepared for all the trees I made.  The usual approach is to dig up the trees bare-root and transplant them, but especially for larger trees it sets them back pretty significantly.  I started using the buckets in hopes of keeping more fine root tissue intact when doing the transplant.  Inevitably as these things go, the trees sit in the nursery for more years than you plan, and in this case the tree (a Wickson) was over 2″ in diameter.  But the roots find their way out between the split sides of the bucket, and the location of the splits gives a good idea where to go looking for them with the shovel.  Emily and I dug out the roots as generously as we could, and between us we could schlep the bucket, tree, and roots onto the platform extension on the front end loader of a tractor.  There was one remaining open spot on the original grid of Seedling rootstock trees (had been thin soil over bedrock, but we piled some extra loam there a few years ago), and we set the tree in this spot, peeling away the bucket at the last moment.

The bucket technique seems to work surprisingly well, and I think it could be the basis of a local small-time nursery business, since the Transfer Station could probably turn up an unlimited supply of used buckets.  But recently I’ve gone over to planting out new benchgrafts directly in their permanent location, resigning myself to replacing the few that don’t make it.

With three sides of the orchard enclosed in permanent fence, and the remaining north side hemmed in by an outcropping of ledge, the natural extent of the orchard is defined.  There is still a bunch of area inside the permanent fenceline that isn’t yet planted; my folks are contemplating adding some berries, and since the peaches seem to be doing well for us, we might plant a block of those in the northwest corner.

On Sunday I put on a hundred gallon tank of dormant oil and copper, with a pound of BT mixed in to knock back the tent caterpillars which were already starting to spin their webs.  There was a light shower as I did the spraying, so I hope it holds on until the first dose of Surround (organic clay protectant) that I will put on when the apples are nickel-sized.  Surround is literally a high-grade kaolin clay product that I sprayed for the first time last year.  It forms a patchy layer of white powder that turns the entire tree a ghostly shade, but apparently the diminished sunlight doesn’t affect the photosynthesis significantly, and I found it to be quite effective against the various curculios and maggots that attack unsprayed fruit.

Speaking of peaches, the peach buds were coming on fast in Five Islands, and when I got back to Stroudwater I was distressed to see that the -25F lows we saw this winter seem to have killed or severely damaged both of the peach trees we have there.  This is an example of where the marine climate on the island is a big help; lows were probably 10F warmer in Five Islands.

The resistance of the Five Islands peaches to a pretty bad winter makes me think I should take peaches a bit more seriously there; to this point I’ve been interplanting them between the apple trees in the rows, which has worked well since the peaches grow significantly faster but die off unpredictably.  But the new block of interstems has a tighter spacing that doesn’t have room for peaches, and the older apple trees are getting bigger, so it will be harder and harder to keep them from getting overspray on them when spraying Surround.  Last year we found that once the peaches get Surround on them, it never comes off.  This is a just a cosmetic issue that doesn’t matter for freezing the fruit, and Surround is nontoxic (I can’t taste the difference eating them out of hand), but if we ever wanted to sell them at Joanna’s farm stand or Heidi’s store, the chalky spots would be a turn-off.

So I’m contemplating doing a block of peaches in the northwest corner, which combined with whatever the folks do with the northeast corner will pretty much finish out the enclosed space.  Our favorite variety so far is Lars Andersen, which is apparently a Local variety that only Fedco offers, but I’ll ask around for other advice before moving ahead.

Thanks again to everyone who pitched in to make the 2018 Orchard Weekend a success!

Extreme Weather: Flash floods in Georgetown (and a tornado?)

An unusually large and fierce mass of thunderstorms passed through midcoast Maine last Wednesday. My grandfather recorded 4.75 inches of rain in less than two hours, and small roads washed severely all over town. The stream that flows out of the small pond to the north of the orchard overtopped the road above the middle field, where it passes under the orchard road in a culvert, and a bunch of freshly placed coarse crushed stone washed downstream. Miraculously, the freshly planted middle field adjacent to the stream did not seem to suffer any visible erosion; perhaps it’s the soil, which is still springy with freshly composted sod, or perhaps the young roots of the buckwheat, less than 2 weeks old at the time, were enough to hold it together. The old part of the orchard has a bombproof sod by now, and the younger part is pretty well established with red clover under the pumpkins and this spring’s orchardgrass/timothy/clover treatment at the periphery, so the worst it saw was the windrow of wood chip mulch washed away in a couple of places. The freshly planted maples along the stone wall were more battered, as a sheet of water carrying leaves and small branches appeared to have swept broadly down the hillside, but the small fences we placed around them seemed to have borne the brunt of the assault, and though the young trees were in many cases buried in leaf matter, none seemed irredeemably tattered.

The most dramatic effect occurred where the pond outlet stream passed under the shore road in a 16″ steel culvert; directly after the storm there was no visible effect, but with the passage of a few vehicles over the weekend a yawning sinkhole a foot in diameter and three feet deep opened up right in the roadbed – it’s a wonder it didn’t swallow up somebody’s axle. The subterranean excavation extended most of the way across the road around and above the culvert, which was largely exposed as seen through the sinkhole – the bottom of the culvert must have rusted out, and this allowed water to run underneath it and undermine it. This was confirmed by the discovery of some rusty chunks of corrugated metal in the outwash below the road – a few more inches of rain and it would have been washed out entirely. My father and grandfather arranged to have the old culvert replaced with a larger 20″ plastic one – we determined that the old one had lasted over forty years.

More dramatic still, we got word that a small tornado or microburst had touched down on the opposite end of the island, and on my way out of town I poked down Bay Point road to check it out. Indeed, just past Don Wilson’s former chicken barn on the west side of the road, a swath of destruction lay down the side of a hill, with great stout oak trees uprooted or broken off rudely halfway up the trunk. Nearby some trees had been knocked over onto somebody’s trailer. Not being from tornado country, I have never seen the destructive aftermath of such a wild piece of weather.

As I understand it, climate scientists predict that global warming will lead to more frequent and more destructive extremes of weather, and while it’s of course impossible to attribute any one event to climate change, I can’t help but feel a bit under siege. I can take some measures of prudence – staking out the young apples and peaches, clearing trees away from the fence lines, keeping sod on the fields as much as possible; girding the streambanks and crossings with stonework – but all of this may be easily overcome, if it decides to rain 10 inches in one crazy storm, or if a ridiculous warm spell causes the buds to break in February. Perhaps we’ll gain some protection from our proximity to the ocean’s moderating influence, but for the most part our little farm faces in microcosm the same looming danger as the planet as a whole.

Low-impact forestry, and a good weekend’s work

Beautiful late winter weather this weekend, and I took advantage, making a solid dent in the remaining selective thinning for the high-octane maple trees.  This is an ongoing project to plant a string of sugar maples that have been specially selected by researchers at Cornell to produce a higher concentration of sugar in the sap.  We’ve located these trees along the south side of a stone wall heading down towards the water, with a sufficient slope that eventually we will be able to run a tube system to collect the sap.  Now, I will be an old, old man by the time these trees are ready to be tapped, but somehow that doesn’t seem to dissuade me.  Besides, in the meanwhile, the project improves the woodland, produces firewood for low-carbon heating, and gets me much needed exercise.   We’ve got our low-impact forestry technique pretty well worked out at this point, so I thought I’d describe it in some detail.

Sugaring season soon; high-efficiency evaporator concepts

It’s definitely still winter here, but if you’re feeling optimistic you can imagine that it’s starting to slip away.  Days are longer, sometimes high temps over 30, and crusty old snow in the woods pockmarked by deer tracks – puts me in mind of the start of sugaring season.  It is said that during some period of blockade (perhaps the war of 1812) Benjamin Franklin floated a plan to make the US independent of tropical sugar by vastly expanding maple syrup production.  It’s an interesting concept; by my best napkin estimate an acre of sugarbush can produced enough calories to feed a person for a year – not as efficient as most field crops, but a lot less work and a lot less environmental upset.  To make this any kind of reality we would however need a much more efficient way to do the evaporation, as compared to the primitive wood and oil-fired evaporator technology now in use.

We don’t sugar here in NH (small town lot with no maple trees), but it was a fixture of the season growing up in Maine when I was a kid.  We had a small Leader evaporator made from a welded-up oil drum with a galvanized sap pan that we’d operate outdoors, producing 5-15 gals per year from around a hundred red maple taps.  It’s classic New England, but from an engineering perspective it seemed really inefficient.  The single-wall steel firebox shed most of its heat out the sides, the combustion was not well-controlled, and the wood used was typically marginally dry softwood slabs or other low grade stuff that wasn’t worth burning as stovewood.  More fundamentally, a huge amount of recoverable heat goes up in steam – about 2200 joules per gram.  The small home evaporator systems make only the most pathetic attempt at recovering the energy in the steam – a preheater pan sits over around 20% of the evaporator – and ironically the condensate that drips off the preheater falls right back into the pan.  So the first step in improving the efficiency would be to make sure to condense all the steam possible onto a heat exchanger delivering the cold sap to the evaporator – and arrange for the condensate not to fall back into the pan.  Still, even if you delivered the maximum amount of heat possible into the cold sap (around 420 J/g to raise it from0C to 100C) you would only have recovered around 20% of the available energy in the steam.  To really boost efficiency, you need to use the steam to boil more sap.  The problem is that the steam will only condense on surfaces colder than 100C – and you need a temperature higher than 100C to drive heat into boiling sap (because sap contains sugar, it boils at a temperature slightly above 100C at one atmosphere).  This could be accomplished with some kind of refrigeration cycle, but that’s too complex for hard-times engineering.   Also energetically efficient but similarly complex is the recent adoption of reverse osmosis by sugarmakers, with attendant tending of  finicky high pressure pumps and delicate membranes. What’s called for is a relatively simple, elegant, robust solution in the (quite literally) steampunk style (also cf. handy apocalypse guide) .

One solution is to condense the primary steam against a secondary evaporator, the contents of which (sap at lower sugar concentration) are held below atmospheric pressure.  This is a convenient way of lowering the boiling point.  This is not a revolutionary concept; I have demonstrated it (sort of in reverse) by boiling water on the lid of my pressure cooker – the steam within the cooker is condensing on the lid at a temperature well above 100C due to elevated internal pressure of about 2 atm absolute, such that the temperature of the lid itself is sufficiently above 100C to initiate vigorous pool boiling of pure water on its surface.   Naturally, the condensate from the secondary evaporator would have to be pumped out of that chamber; a mechanical pump would certainly do, but in the spirit of low-energy passive design it occurs to me that at least on the coast of Maine (and in many hilly regions where syrup is produced) it is not difficult to find 32 feet of vertical relief; a stable vacuum of the desired level could be established by maintaining a fluid column of condensate in a tube and controlling its escape from the secondary condensate sump with a float valve.  A glance at a steam table indicates that a pressure of around 0.6 atm is sufficient to decrease the boiling point of water by around 15C, which should be sufficient to drive boiling in the secondary evaporator.   The reduced-pressure secondary evaporator also provides a convenient means of drawing fresh sap into the system – again regulated by a float valve.  On the other hand, the partially concentrated syrup must of course be pumped from the secondary evaporator into the (atmospheric) primary evaporator.  This could be accomplished by a hand pump if the system is monitored steadily (the amount of shaft work required being relatively modest) or in concession to modern technology a small diaphragm pump.  Condensate (either from the primary or secondary evaporator) would again be used to preheat the incoming feed of sap.

By means of this dual-stage evaporator, the energy required to make syrup could be decreased from approximately 2600 J/gram of sap plus losses to around 1100 plus losses.  Of course, still greater efficiency could be achieved by condensing the evaporated steam from the secondary evaporator against the underside of a tertiary evaporator (operating at perhaps 0.2psi absolute) and so on ad infinitum.  A primary boiler stage operated at elevated pressure is also conceivable.  But a doubling (or better, given concomitant thermal conservation measures of a more pedestrian nature) of evaporating efficiency as an initial goal seems reasonable.  I have not pieced together all of the mechanical and fluidic aspects in my head, but my dim mental picture is quite satisfying, combining the favorable aesthetics of the African Queen with that of a backwoods moonshine still.  Also, the potential for catastrophic explosion is almost too good to pass up.

Snow, Farmi winch

Well, the good lord has seen fit to bless us with another foot of snow, so I’m sitting by the fire with a glass of cider and a slab of chocolate cake, contemplating the state of the world.  We went up to Maine last weekend, and on Saturday Joshua and I did some work in the woodlot to prepare for transplanting the sugar maple trees, and in the process tried out Dave’s new Farmi PTO forestry winch.  This is a really neat contraption that hooks up to the 3-point hitch of our 25hp tractor and draws power from the splined PTO shaft that protrudes from the back of the tractor.  Its basic function is to winch logs out of the woods with its 150′ cable, and we found that it works pretty nicely.  We felled a 10 inch maple and three oaks (up to perhaps 14″ diameter) that I had previously selected for thinning to make room for the string of Cornell University improved sugar maple trees.  Our typical practice is to buck up firewood trees into 4 foot lengths (if up to about 8-10″ diameter) or 16″ lengths (if larger), load them onto a trailer, unload them in our traditional firewood-fitting spot near the house, then subsequently buck, split, stack, and trailer them once again to the woodshed or basement.  With the winch, we limbed them where they fell, then pulled them tree-length to a new fitting yard we established by the upper cabin.  This saves us the step of trailering the wood to the yard, and gives us a couple of options.  We can fit and stack it right where it is, transporting it once more to the woodshed.  Alternatively, since we have had more than enough hardwood for our own needs recently, my dad can cut it to 10 foot lengths, load it in his dump trailer with the small excavator, and sell it to folks who are willing to fit it themselves for a discount relative to the fitted price.

As to the performance of the winch itself I would rate it as thoroughly satisfactory given the conditions.  There was about 8″ of old snow on the ground, with the ground frozen underneath, so piloting the tractor over uneven ground was an approximate affair, with extensive use of differential lock and left and right wheel brakes.  The winch itself has a dozer blade which helps to prevent the tractor from backsliding, which was surprisingly effective given the icy ground conditions.  The cable takeup is activated by a clutch by way of a lanyard, and the clutch tension is set about right – if the log hits an obstacle, the winch slips before the engine stalls as long as it’s idled up reasonably high.  The most serious limitation was that the tractor did not have enough traction to actually skid the large timber on the snowy ground – I had to make the entire ~500 foot trip to the yard using about 4 sequential pulls.  This wasn’t too bad; I could reel one in, then freespool the cable out and hitch it to the choker on the next one.  Once they were all drawn up short, I’d freespool the winch again and pull the tractor ahead.  We could pull the logs up a fairly steep incline, over an old stone wall, etc – only a direct hit on a stump would bring things to a halt.  We should have had a peavy on hand to help guide things along, but we didn’t think of it so had to use brute force.  If the ground conditions were dry (or if we had Canadian chains for the tractor) we would have been able to skid the logs directly, saving time.  We also would have benefitted from having some purpose-made 5/16 choker chains, rather than the all-purpose 3/8″ tow chains that we had.  We also noted that it’s important to leave strategically placed trees to be cut last, in order to take the brunt of the logs as they pass, sparing the keeper trees from damage to the trunks near the roots.  But especially under frozen ground conditions and with careful planning, the Farmi winch seems to be a useful tool that promises to substantially streamline harvesting firewood and responsible woodlot management.

Summer orchard progress

Life has been busy what with lots of solar cell engineering and a renewed focus on the fiddle (I’ve added a couple really cool, rhythmic minor key tunes – Cliffs of Moher and Morrison’s, and some old favorites, including Spootiskerry, Silver Spear, Drowsy Maggie, and Julia Delaney), but I’ve been up to work on the orchard a couple of times over the last few weeks.  I mowed down the rye/vetch mix, which had grown up into a massive tangle of verdant vines almost as tall as I am.  The orchard grass/clover/timothy mix I put down has come up pretty well, though it’s thin in the drier spots because of the lack of rain.  I tried out the new irrigation pump, which I hooked up to the black pipe I installed earlier in the year.  The tiny four cycle motor can put out a nice stream from a garden hose even at a pretty low idle, and it handily provides for two hoses at full bore.  It appears as if it could run at least four rainbirds simultaneously if I ever wanted to water the whole half acre, though to save water I probably won’t do that except in emergencies (e.g getting a cover crop to sprout in a dry spell).  It makes it pretty easy to dump five or ten gallons on each tree in short order.  I also patrolled the fenceline, pulling weeds that were in danger of shorting the fence, and put a coat of white paint with rotenone on the bases of the apple tree trunks to ward off borers.  That mixture is an experiment; the suggested mix of white paint and drywall compound did not seem to deter the borers, though it did make it easier to see the damage they inflict.   An infestation of Japanese beetles started munching on the trees, so my mom put out some pheremone traps that seemed to collect them pretty well.  The trees generally seem to be doing well; most have added 8-12″ of new growth despite being transplanted, and I had to release the species nametags that came on them, to keep them from constricting the stems as they expand.

I also dragged a couple of cords of four foot firewood out of the woods from the maple area with help from my Mom and my cousin Matthew using the cordwood hauler, and put it on my grandfather’s firewood pile.  I put a few tanks of gas through the chainsaw clearing further down the hill along the stone wall for the maples, and helped my folks bush-hog the fields (gotta get some sheep to make use of all that grass).  My cousin and I also cut down a couple of crooked wild apple trees and a dying pine to make room for a giant compost pile behind the pole barn, where roots from the orchard clearing and crooked softwood chunks can slowly decay to mulch over the coming decades.  All in all things are going and growing well, and I look forward to seeing how the trees look on Labor Day weekend.

In the ground!

The first 22 fruit trees of the new orchard were planted on Saturday the 14th.  We were joined by 8 friends who came up to help with the planting.  A storm had blown through mid-week, but fortunately only about an inch of snow fell in Georgetown.  My folks had tarped the nursery bed before the storm, and when we pulled the tarps the soil was in good condition despite the snow and rain.  So, on Saturday morning I disked down the bed and ran the spring harrow over it a couple of times, then everyone set to work digging holes, planting the trees, and watering them in.  In addition to the fruit trees we also planted twenty of the Cornell maple cuttings, which will hopefully provide us high-octane sap in a few decades.  We also did some clearing, moved some brush and manure, gathered seaweed for mulch/fertilizer, and stacked some firewood for my grandparents, who aren’t quite as spry as they once were.  At the end of the day we extended a nearby fence to protect the young trees from deer.  Here’s a photo of the action:

A big storm was scheduled to hit late Sunday, so everyone took off mid-day for Boston, after a walk on the beach at Reid park.  As it turned out, the coast got mostly rain, while Alexis and I headed for New Hampshire through the slush.  The storm knocked the power out on the North End for several days, but they are pretty much used to that.  And, finally, spring has arrived, with sun and temps in the 60s.  The new orchard site should finally dry out, to the point that we can hopefully work the soil and plant the cover crop when my sister comes in May.

Hearty thanks to everyone who lent a hand; we should start getting apples around 2012.

Trees Arrived; Slow Spring

It’s been a slow, cold spring.  Alexis and I are just back from a long weekend in Maine, and it never broke 45 degrees the whole time we were there.  A late-season snowstorm dropped 10″ of snow middle of last week, and much of it was still on the ground when we arrived.  The snow fell heavy and wet, and the wind was nearly calm, so it built up on trees, and falling limbs caused minor damage to some buildings.  It killed the power for three days – when there’s a big storm the power crews take a long time to get down the back roads.  The maple sap is usually done flowing by this time of year, but almost 60 gallons flowed on Sunday.  Another storm is blowing in on Thursday; hopefully it’s rain but they say it might be some snow as well.

Despite the cold temperatures and limited sunshine, the snow melted appreciably while we were there and is coming off the fields, but it persists in the woods.   The apple trees arrived from Fedco today, along with 4 peaches and 2 cherries.  I’ve already got 50 pounds of Peas/Vetch/Oats mix for the new orchard spot, as soon as the ground is dry enough to work and seed, and clover to spread between the new trees.  I was going to do some prep for the planting this last weekend, but with things still pretty damp I focused on woods work, cutting crummy fir and swamp maple along the westward stone wall that leads down to the cove.  The supercharged sugar maples from Cornell will go along either side of the stone wall when the clearing is done.

Orchard Weekend

We’ve set the date for the first North End Orchard Weekend in April; I’ll send invites out soon, or write me email for more info. Highlights:

• Sixteen heirloom apple trees, four peaches, and two cherry trees will be planted in the nursery bed
• The new orchard site will be cleaned up, turned over, and seeded with soil-building cover crop
• Fencing needs to be moved to protect the new trees, possibly also fencing around the new orchard
• Twenty high-octane sugar maples will be planted, either in the nursery or along the stone wall down to the cove
• Further orchard clearing, brush chipping, and compost-making as time permits
• Meet the goats (Willow and Larry), three new dogs (Kermit, Zoey, and Lacey) and check out Dave’s new excavator

We’ll provide grub and (rustic) accommodation, also a tank of last year’s hard cider as well as apples and fresh cider (if we can find any decent stuff), and music (if people bring instruments). It will be a good time. Too cold to swim, but there are usually canoes around.